Last Updated: 7 min read

How to Familiarize Yourself with Top Guests in Your First Week as a New GM

Loyalist Staff

A new GM can learn the menu and the team in a few days, but learning the guests takes much longer. The regulars, VIPs and event hosts still expect to be known the moment they walk in. The hardest part is: most of what the venue knows about them sits in separate systems and in the departing GM’s memory.

What should a new GM do first to learn the top guests?

Ask the owner or Director of Ops for a single list of the group’s top guests before your first day. For each guest, request their name, visit count, total spend, and a brief note about them.

Top guests generally fall into four groups:

  • Frequent regulars: Guests who visit often.
  • High spenders: Guests who may visit less frequently but spend more per visit.
  • Event hosts: Guests who book private dining rooms or full buyouts.
  • Lapsed regulars: Guests who previously belonged to one of the first three groups but have stopped visiting.

When requesting the list, name all four groups so the team knows which guests to include. This gives you a more complete picture of the relationships you’ll be responsible for maintaining.

Where does top-guest knowledge live in a restaurant?

Top-guest knowledge lives in five places: the reservation system, the POS, the events platform, review sites and the departing GM’s memory.

  1. Reservation system: visit history, notes, tags and VIP status.
  2. POS: spend and the dishes each guest orders.
  3. Events platform: private dining hosts and what they booked.
  4. Review sites: what guests said after a visit.
  5. People: the departing GM, the host team and senior servers know faces, names and habits that no system recorded.

We call the cost of this split the Fragmentation Tax. Each system holds one piece of the guest’s history, but none provides the full picture. Operators pay for this fragmentation in time spent reconciling spreadsheets, maintaining notes, and piecing together guest preferences. They also miss opportunities to recognize and acknowledge their best guests. The biggest cost comes on handover day, when the person who held that knowledge in their head walks out the door.

Loyalist brings reservations, POS spend, event bookings, and reviews together in one guest profile. Instead of opening four different systems to understand a guest, a new GM can see their history in one place.

With that data consolidated, a GM can also ask questions directly of the guest database without relying on someone else to pull reports or explain the guest base. Who spends the most? Who visits most often? Who regularly books private events? Who are the group’s top VIPs? Loyalist can surface these answers from the data, without requiring the previous GM or another team member to translate what they know into a spreadsheet.

How do you build a one-page top-guest briefing?

Build the briefing in four steps from the systems you already have, and keep it to one page. Do the steps in order, because each one adds to the list from the step before.

  1. Pull guests by visits, preferences, and spend over the last 12 months from the reservation system and the POS.
  2. Add event hosts from the events platform, even if they rarely dine with you.
  3. Add a review flag for any guest who left a strong or poor review.
  4. Check the list with the departing GM and fix anything wrong or missing.

Each guest should get three short lines: who they are, what they spend or book, and what they prefer. You can start by drafting these for your first 10 guests by hand.

Alternatively, a guest CRM does the same job without the manual pull. For example, Loyalist joins reservation, POS, review and event data into one guest profile, so the top-guest list comes from one single source of truth. Loyalist can also send this report automatically. Its daily pre-shift sheet lists each booked guest with visit count, allergies, notes and tags.

Cap the first list at about 40 guests

About 40 names is enough for week one, and anywhere from 30 to 50 works. A list this size should be read before every service so you can memorize it. An extremely long one gets skipped. Start with your 40 and pick up everyone else through the daily pre-shift list as they book.

Rank event hosts by what they booked

Rank event hosts by the size of their bookings, because one booking can outweigh a year of regular visits. Event clients rarely look like regulars in visit counts, so a pull based on visits will miss them.

Demand for these rooms is growing. OpenTable’s guide to how private dining can work for any restaurant reports that private dining inquiries on OpenTable more than doubled last year. It also notes that private dining is often booked weeks ahead of busy seasons. Ask the events lead or your CRM for last year’s top hosts.

Mark guests who dine at sister venues

In a group, mark any guest who is a VIP at a sister venue, because they may be new to this room. A regular two blocks away expects the same welcome here. Check each guest’s visits across the group’s venues and add a note such as “VIP at sister venue.”

How do review notes tell you who to meet first?

Review notes show which top guests had a great visit and which had a poor one, so you know who to greet first. Read the last 6 to 12 months of reviews and feedback tied to guests on your list. A glowing review tells you what to protect. A poor one tells you what to fix before that guest returns.

Reach out to unhappy reviewers personally, as the new GM. Google’s Tips to get more reviews suggests asking unhappy reviewers to contact you by phone or email to resolve the issue. That keeps the conversation between you and the guest. Google also prohibits incentives for posting, changing or removing a review, so never offer one.

For help with wording, our guide on how to respond to restaurant reviews walks through replies.

How do you capture what the departing GM knows?

Sit with the departing GM for one session and walk the list name by name. Save each note into the guest’s reservation profile as you go.

For each guest, ask how they like to be greeted and what has gone wrong before. Ask who else at the table matters, such as a partner or a business guest. These details rarely appear in any system.

Write each answer into the reservation profile during the meeting. Notes kept in a notebook or on a personal phone leave with the GM. Notes saved in the profile show up at the host stand on the guest’s next booking.

Loyalist keeps these notes from leaving with the GM. It writes guest tags and notes back into Resy, OpenTable and SevenRooms, so the next GM sees them at the host stand and a returning top guest is greeted the way the last GM would have greeted them. Each connection and what it writes back is listed on the integrations page.

What is the most common mistake in a guest handover?

The most common mistake is changing what regulars rely on before you know who relies on it. Moving a regular’s table, swapping a wine they order, or dropping a dish they love can cost a guest in one visit. These changes look small on paper. To the guest, they feel like the venue forgot them.

RotaCloud’s advice for a first week as a manager also warns against big changes early. Before you change a table plan, a wine list or a menu item, check the briefing for guests who order it.

Guest handover FAQ

How long should a GM handover take?

A guest handover should take about one week. Get the top-guest list before day one. Sit with the departing GM in your first three days and work a few services together. After week one, daily pre-shift lists carry the work forward.

What should a top-guest briefing include?

Each guest needs a name, visit count, spend or booking value, one preference line and any review flag. Event hosts belong on it too. Our post on Tripleseat to Resy explains how event bookings can appear in the book.

Should a new GM introduce themselves to regulars?

Yes. Introduce yourself at the table on their next visit, and use the briefing to mention something they like. For lapsed regulars, send a short personal note first and invite them in to meet you.

How do you find lapsed regulars in your first week?

Filter the guest list for regulars with no visit in 60 days or more. Sort them by past visits and spend. Check the review notes for each one, since a poor last visit may explain the gap.

What if the departing GM has already left?

Run the same session with the host team and senior servers, who know faces and habits. Then read the reservation notes and reviews for each guest. Save every new note into the guest’s reservation profile as you go.

Can a spreadsheet work for a guest handover?

A spreadsheet works for a first list at one venue. It goes out of date fast and never reaches the host stand, so notes get lost at the next handover. Our post Does your restaurant need a CRM? covers when to move on from sheets.

Sources

Loyalist Staff
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